“Ingenious,” I murmured, as I cut along the lines, “though it makes a mess of my pocketbook.”
At that point, laying out the portraits of Sherlock Holmes with – and without – his false beard and pince-nez, we placed the frontal and profile triangles over the photographs.
“They match perfectly every time!” I congratulated Holmes.
“Wouldn’t you care for a drop of tea to celebrate?” he said, turning to his samovar, while I examined the remaining portraits.
“Thank you, no,” I said. “Now, where is my photograph, I wonder?”
Apart from the fourteen cabinet cards of Sherlock Holmes, the only other thing contained in the package was a black paper envelope of slightly smaller dimensions. We had paid no attention to it, believing it to be, I suppose, a receipt for the work done, a sum which Holmes had paid when the package had been delivered that morning by a boy from the Elliott & Fry studio.
Holmes was busy, loading his cup of loathsome Woojeon tea with six cubes of sugar. “The final test in the tea series for today,” as he himself remarked.
I opened the black envelope, pulled out a flimsy sheet of paper.
“It’s a photograph,” I said, “but not mine. It must belong to someone else.” I turned the picture over, and found a large letter M written in blue crayon on the back of it. “And what in heaven’s name is this supposed to mean?”
Holmes put down his cup and came across to look. As he took the picture from my fingers, I noticed that the portrait was rapidly beginning to turn black.
“It hasn’t been fixed,” I said.
“On purpose,” Holmes remarked, holding up a portrait of a man with a high-domed forehead and a thin nose. “Mister Elliott was busy in the Portrait Parlour when we arrived, do you remember? And then he complained that the sitter had made his escape down the backstairs when our names were announced by the receptionist.”
“Escape?” I said. “Why would he wish to escape?”
“Can’t you guess who he was? I have a score to settle with that man,” said Sherlock Holmes.
“Which man?” I asked, perplexed.
“You’ve never seen Professor Moriarty, have you, Watson?”
“Moriarty?”
Holmes handed me the black sheet of paper. “The professor inherited tendencies of the most diabolical kind,” he said. “Well, now we know that he has a diabolical sense of humour, too. He was probably following Mycroft. He may have known, or guessed, what my brother was up to. On the other hand, he could have been visiting the studio for some purpose known only to himself.”
“A passport!” I cried. “Having a suitable picture made before it becomes law.”
“He knows of Mycroft’s plans, then.”
“And the picture faded away before we had the chance to take his measurements.”
“I’ll catch him yet, I promise you,” said Holmes.
He walked across to the grate and dropped the blackened sheet of paper on the smouldering coals. As the heat took hold of the paper and twisted it, a negative image appeared for a moment or two. A face? It was more like a skull than the semblance of any normal human being. White pinpoints of eyes set in two black cavities, sunken cheeks and sharp high cheekbones, a thin nose, high-domed forehead, and a frightful smirk on his twisted white lips.
Then the paper turned black and exploded into flames.
“The ghost that haunts me,” Holmes said, sitting down in a slump on the sofa.
What was he going to do now, I wondered, reach for his violin, or his cocaine and syringe?
“I think I’ll have another cup of Woojeon,” he said. “Are you sure you won’t join me, Watson?”
The Skeleton of Contention
Rhys Hughes
The heroes of Chaud-Mellé find their costumes in locked boxes in the shadows of walled-up markets or under floorboards in the houses of invisible aunts. They sometimes digest food they have not eaten and they can do other strange, troubling things.
Often they languish in prisons, misunderstood and despised, where they pass the time fighting time itself, the dripping ceilings and boot creakings that count it for them.
Costumes might be found even there.
The prisons of Chaud-Mellé are full of real men chained to iron balls, iron men chained to pulsing globules of flesh washed up on the shores of stagnant inner seas, and tiny men who have painstakingly hollowed out rooms in their own black spheres and dwell inside, peeping from frosted glass portholes and dreaming that two imprisonments, like two negatives, can be combined into one freedom.
But freedom is not always a positive.
Meanwhile, in the cinemas there are enough colours to balance out the greys and glooms of the dark places, enough pure sighs to cancel the groans of the unwashed spaces, and awe in abundance to enhance the prodigious mystery of indigenous faces in a city where not to be odd or dangerous is to be eccentric. Cinemas are popular.
The audiences in this city that is also a mountain republic have an insatiable appetite for new films, the latest productions from France and Italy, the gaudier the better, the brighter the nicer, the thicker the palette the thinner the communal despair. They fill ten thousand seats every night, rowdy as bullfight spectators, lips pursed in mocking whistles, slamming folding chairs, stamping, bawling, slapping from their shoulders flakes of fake pale skin shaken from the trembling alabaster cherubs that cling to the ceiling like divinely warped geckos.
Now the safety curtain is lifted and the projector beam becomes a bridge of motes to the screen and the huge hush is more startling than the former hubbub as muscles relax and bodies slump deeper into ripped plush chairs and the first comprehensible images appear.
The cinemas are the only places in Chaud-Mellé where people achieve satisfaction while all pointing in the same direction.
Real living heroes are not welcome.
The Bone of Contention hoped to meet enough compatible people over the years to form a Skeleton of Contention that would clatter most challengingly over the bridges of the cobblescaled city. Kindred spirits and sibling souls he sought with increasing fervour, almost to the point of forgetting to be what he was, an enigmatic hero.
The cobbles of the streets and alleyways were not placed there by human agency. A shower of small meteorites deposited them and the roads were later designed to follow the chance patterns. This neatly explains the pointless twists and turns.
The Bone wore a costume of black silk, a mask the colour of marrow and on his chest was stitched the symbol of a femur. He had difficulties climbing, jumping and swinging, but he played all types of xylophone with amazing dexterity, unfortunately.
His rancour at the injustices of urban life was extreme.
In his heart might be located bitterness, anger, love, loneliness, desire for unknown things that always seemed about to reveal their true characters, a fluctuation between the conviction he had wasted his youth and spent it superbly, deep frustration at the inadequacies of his own idealism; and these conflicting feelings might be easily seen as solid objects by an emotion lens, which is a device never yet invented by any scientist, mad or otherwise.
The Doctors of Progress were meeting this very night.
In the lowest room of the highest tower of the ancient university on the steepest hill below the moon, they gathered, cloaks limp without the arousing wind, spectacles shining.
“It seems a chemist in Stuttgart has refined the process further. More than a billion new colours are available!”
“This is good, but a billion is not a trillion; and in fact is as far from being so as a strudel is from being a knockwurst.”
“How can we be sure that—”
“Only through further experimentation may we—”
Tempers were bubbling, boiling.
“Gentlemen!” The voice imposed itself like a wedge into the debate, propping open the gates of mouths.
They looked to see who had spoken.
Professor James Moriarty.
&
nbsp; They knew him as you know him, as everyone knows him, and he was everything he ought to be, and more. The domed forehead shone but did not glisten, despite the overheated atmosphere that prevailed in a chamber where so many feared the scorn of their peers.
His cane rested against the table.
With only a single droplet of sweat to trickle down his nose and hang on the tip like a miniature vessel of molten glass, he leaned forward and the effect in the half-light was peculiar, as if perspective was wrong, as if he had learned to loom suddenly from a great distance.
Then he spoke and the movement of his lips appeared to lag slightly behind the utterance of the words, as if he was a character in a foreign film that had been badly dubbed. He said:
“The invention of new colours is doubtless a worthy pursuit in a world that has faded due to the erosions of war and its resultant shortages; and yes, the utilisation of these bright and uplifting pigments in various industries is a boon to civilisation and something for which we should be grateful. Textiles, photography, publishing, cosmetics, and many other sectors of commercial enterprise will continue to benefit enormously, but are we going to focus our minds on superficialities? We are above that.”
He rested his arms on the oaken table and smiled.
There was an anguished pause.
One of the others present made bold to answer: “What are you proposing?”
“Something grand.” And he made no grand gesture to accompany his words; and this lack of a gesture served as the gesture itself, in the same way that an absence may more acutely define a presence and the depiction of the space around an object outline that object with awful clarity. There was a snuffling behind him and he nodded.
The eyes of the notables peered in that direction.
“Was it necessary to—”
“I am sorry to say that it was.” Moriarty was the only one who did not look back. “Because this city of yours is infested with heroes who are fools but inconvenient all the same; and although our chamber is difficult to enter without permission, it still takes only boldness and determination to bypass the other security measures and burst in upon us. One extra safeguard is not a bad thing. A last line of slobbering defence.”
“He has the girth of a Cerberus!”
“Yes, he does, rather.”
Yellow eyes shone weakly in the gloom and though they were a sickly hue, the beast itself was in robust health, a mass of blackness with the occasional gleam of tooth and sparkling chain of saliva, a drool consisting of prismatic pearls on a slimy cord that pooled at the front paws of the slavering bulk. Felt rather than seen or heard, the hound imposed its presence by increasing the pressure on the ambient shadows.
Moriarty had chained him to a bronze ring on the wall, which was the last reminder of days when Chaud-Mellé students rode horses to the college and stabled them in lecture theatres.
His existence was a magnetic anomaly in the room.
Attracting anxieties like iron filings.
“Most heroes who live here,” ventured an old fellow, “have been put in jail. I assert that one can be too cautious and that some precautions are a graver danger than the thing they avert.”
“I never saw a more malevolent beast,” said another.
“Barely a dog at all but a—”
Moriarty replied crisply, “He is a black Šarplaninac, a breed from the mountains of Albania, but this is unimportant. What I wish to discuss with you is the subject of profits through science.”
Only with glacial urgency did the attention of the attendees return to a contemplation of the business at hand, the plotting and planning of crimes to supplement their meagre academic salaries.
“I intend, gentlemen, to bend the fourth dimension to my will.”
“Time travel!” came the communal gasp.
“Of a special kind, yes.”
“But that is absurd and outrageous!”
Moriarty shrugged and his shrug demonstrated purer tedium than the widest yawn. It seemed to agree with the sentiment that had been expressed and yet despise it at the same time; and also to be weary of the contradiction. Everyone waited for him to speak but he was plainly in no rush. He drew the moment out by rubbing his jaw slowly.
Then he said, “Nonetheless, I have found a method.”
“A time machine? Surely not!”
Now he rubbed the nape of his neck, eyes shut.
His other hand was busy tapping the tip of his walking cane against the wooden floorboards, a gentle rhythm.
“Gentlemen, you are not amateurs, you are not beguiled by fantasies, I will never be able to trick you with words. Of course I am not talking about using a time machine in order to enhance our prospects. It would be useless for such a purpose. In fact, I have one with me and it has never been of any benefit at all. Permit me to demonstrate.”
He reached into his pocket and withdrew a thin silver spoon and a metal spring, then placed them on the table with an air of mock reverence and pushed the handle of the spoon into the spring so that the coils encircled it like the solidified orbits of agitated air molecules.
Then he stood straight and nodded benignly at nothing. “May I have your opinion, gentlemen?”
“That is a time machine?”
“Not exactly.” He gazed sadly down at the conjoined objects. “But it might as well be, for it is no less effective than a real time machine and just as useful to us, which is to say, not at all.”
The murmuring was subdued but deeply unhappy.
“You jest with us, but why?”
Moriarty sighed. “Very well. If I must explain everything, then I shall. Were our little gathering to agree to employ a time machine in the evolution of our plans, we would have to invent the device ourselves, for I am utterly convinced that one does not exist elsewhere.”
He rocked on his heels and continued. “Pay attention now. Suppose a machine of this kind was actually developed. We rejoice at the belief we are free to create all sorts of havoc in the past, to manipulate events in previous ages in order to enhance our present prospects; but that assumption is a gross error; for the instant we attempt to propel the device against the flow of time our hopes fly apart. They disintegrate even as the body of the machine does, for its component parts have a personal history that is no less real than the history of the greater world in which they exist.
“Do you follow? The nuts and bolts, cogs and wires, all the elements that constitute the body and engine of the device only come into conjunction with each other at the instant when the contraption is created. Thus the time machine cannot be sent back to a time earlier than that, because the separate parts necessarily exist in different locations.
“So when a brave explorer mounts the vehicle and, gripping the lever resolutely in his hands with a faraway look in his eyes, shifts it into reverse, the vehicle must come to a halt at the precise time it was first completed. It cannot proceed any further backwards, because the parts that make it work will no longer be together but in the places they originally came from, the drawer of a junk room, the highest shelf of an electrician’s garage, the cellar of an ironmonger’s. They will be scattered.
“Thus to employ a time machine to travel a great distance backwards in time, for example, several centuries, we must construct the device and then wait for a length of time exactly equivalent to those centuries. Our maximum range into the past is only the moment when the machine was successfully completed. That is why this humble object on the table before you is, to all intents and purposes, a working time machine, for it is equally useless to us, equally incapable of taking us into the past.”
With the air of a lecturer who has rushed through a lesson in order to go to lunch early, Moriarty spread his arms.
They were offended, humiliated.
“So much for the past!” huffed one guest. “What about the future? A time machine could be used to facilitate illegal deeds in coming weeks. To anticipate stock market fluctuations and—”
“The fut
ure? Gentlemen, the future is overdue.”
There was a dull reverberation at the solid door that was the only entrance and exit from the chamber. It was an explosion but oddly muted, as if the entire force of the blast had gone into the body of the door and remained there. But the door swung open anyway.
The intruder lurched forward, regained balance.
His silk costume was so dark and so perfectly clean that it was plainly visible in the muddier gloom beyond the reach of the lamp above the table. The eyes behind the mask scanned the chamber, fixed on Moriarty, and the entire mask creased itself, powered by a hidden frown. “Here is the future,” said Moriarty theatrically. “A little late.”
The Bone of Contention took a determined step.
And the dog was on him.
The chain that held it to the bronze ring was long.
The lunge was horribly graceful.
Like a storm cloud pregnant with a violent downpour flinging itself at the mass of a granite mountain, the hound rushed through the air towards the disguised hero. The impact was like the smack of a hand on a fully satisfied grotesque belly but enormously magnified.
They went down together.
They rolled, snarled, grappled. Cloth tore, bone snapped.
Moriarty observed, carefully aloof.
Other spectators were more excitable, aghast.
“Your dog is losing!”
“Yes, he is, but I never bothered to name him, so let us not grow too sentimental at his impending demise.”
The Bone of Contention was a hero and heroes have powers and skills and the holy blessing of contrivance. Bloodied and numbed, garb in disarray, rents of silk hanging down like thirsty mutant tongues, he staggered away from the canine corpse, slipping once in the gore smeared on the soles of his boots, accelerating towards the table.
Moriarty calmly watched and waited for the right moment. Then he lifted his cane and aimed it at the avenger.
The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty Page 56
